Lost's Storm Wave Is No Tsunami; Couldn't Carry a Ship Inland

In addition to finally explaining why Richard doesn't age, "Ab Aeterno" gave us an insane amount of answers (so that's what the island is!) and imparted a dire warning: If the Man in Black leaves the Island, everyone on earth goes to hell. The episode also showed us how Alpert came to the island—on the Black Rock, which was deposited inland by a massive storm wave after destroying the island's famous four-toed statue. But could a wooden ship really do that much damage? Popular Mechanics spoke to experts to find out.

Last night's episode of Lost, "Ab Aeterno" (or "since the beginning of time"), depicted a flashback to the life and times of our favorite ageless, eyelinered Other, Richard Alpert. As suspected, he came to the island in 1867, a criminal—he accidentally killed a doctor while trying to get medicine for his sick wife—from Spain's Canary Islands who was sold into slavery on the Black Rock. The ship is caught in a storm, and a huge wave sends it careening into Tawret, the 250-foot-tall Egyptian statue that sits on the island's shore. The statue is destroyed, leaving only the four-toed foot and ankle behind; the Black Rock, meanwhile, is deposited, nearly intact, in the middle of the jungle. Which begs the question: Could a wooden ship really take out a stone statue? And would it leave the ship largely intact?

The short answer is yes—if the ship were carried by a proper wave. "The collision between a ship carried by a tsunami or storm surge and a statue could leave the ship fairly intact and the statue in pieces, particularly if the ship hit it fairly high and simply knocked it over," Costas Synolakis, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California, tells Popular Mechanics by e-mail from Chile, where he is surveying the impact of the Feb. 28, 2010, tsunami. The hydraulic bores caused by tsunamis and the storm surges caused by hurricanes are capable of impressive force: Researchers at Oregon State University's O.H. Hinsdale Wave Lab use their Hurricane Wavemaker to test the effects of surges on structures built to full scale within the facility's wave flume; a typical bore from a tsunami wave hits structures with as much as 8000 pounds of force. And that's not even accounting for debris, which causes an incredible amount of damage during tsunamis and hurricanes.

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It's also totally feasible that the Black Rock would end up on land, away from the shore. "Today, in Juan Fernandez, an island off Chile, we found a 10-foot-tall light post on a pier that was bent as it was hit by a fishing vessel, which was carried by the tsunami as it flowed over the pier," Synolakis says. "The vessel was deposited on land on the other side of the pier—it traveled about a half-mile from the point of impact to its final resting place."

The keywords here are tsunami and storm surge—and this is where Lost gets it wrong. The Black Rock appears to be carried onto the island on the crest of a wave. "Storm waves can crest quite high, but they don't penetrate far inland," Synolakis says. "In this regard, once on land, tsunamis do not have crests; they either resemble fast ebbing or receding tides or, more rarely, bores. For a ship to hit a statue and penetrate far inland, it would have to have been carried by a tsunami or a hurricane surge, not by a storm wave."

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